Pebble's $10m smart watch gets release date

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By Nicole Kobie in Las Vegas

Posted on 9 Jan 2013 at 18:03

The Pebble smart watch is ready to ship, after the Kickstarter project was delayed for almost four months.

Pebble is a $150 smart watch that connects to an Android handset or iPhone over Bluetooth to deliver texts, emails, call notifications and other information.

It was built following a massively successful fundraising campaign on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, raising more than $10 million from 65,000 people despite only asking for $100,000.

CEO Eric Migicovsky announced the Pebble watch at CES 2013, saying it was not only the company's first press conference, but the first he's ever attended too.

"To us, a smart watch is a connected device, which means it talks to your smartphone, and it's customisable, which means it can run different apps, and it’s sleek," he explained.

Pebble details

The Pebble features a 1.6in, 144 x 168 e-paper display - Migicovsky stressed it's not E Ink, but an LCD that can play 30fps animations. The display is black and white and "perfectly readable outdoors under direct sunlight," he said.

Pebble has a battery life of seven days, as the e-paper display doesn't require much power. Because the watch is connected to a smartphone all the time, it drains the handset's battery by as much as 5-10% a day, Migicovsky admitted.

The smart watch runs a proprietary Pebble OS on top of FreeRT OS. It comes with apps built-in to display different watch faces, and Migicovsky showed off a standard analogue design, a fuzzy time that shows vague text such as "ten to ten", and another that shows the time in binary.

Aside from showing the time, the system pushes notifications from a smartphone app to the watch. That includes text messages, iMessages, and emails, with the text displaying directly on the watch. "It allows you to make a time management decision – is this email something I need to respond to right now, or deal with a little bit later?"

Pebble supports notifications from web services, such as Facebook and If This Then That. That latter site allows users to send automated messages. Migicovsky set one up a warning if it was set to snow in Las Vegas, but other IFTTT services include Instagram, LinkedIn and Evernote.

Calls can be directed to the watch, which vibrates when a call is incoming. A user can see who's calling and push the call to voicemail directly from the watch.